I know Midnight_Stories has one of these going here now.  I had a nice one at Daz that went on for 25 some odd pages before the forum reboot.  I tried starting a new one at the new daz, but it just didn't turn out to be as lively, productive, or rewarding. The rational is the same as before. I make a lot of stuff, much for personal use, some for commercial release (25 items here, 1 at daz3d), lots for free (73 items at sharecg) and a great deal of which I just kind of forget about because I've got a habit of working on things as long as they're fun and then quitting.

Zbrushcentral is full of sketchbook threads, but as the ultimate end application of my work is poser and studio, their site just wouldn't be the place for a thread of my own. So I thought I'd give it another go here.

I've got a couple of your morph sets and I love them.  A thread here would always be welcome, I'm sure.

I expect that a lot of threads at Daz are fading away only because of the post bumping failure, and not because of a lack of interest in the topics themselves. Hopefully, they'll fix the forums.... within a reasonably short period of time. :)

http://cghub.com/images/view/159057/

http://cghub.com/images/view/225716/

Up until now I've focused primarily on morphs with very little attention to textures.  The only exception being my duck people, but even their textures are fairly simple in their way, just being a lot of repetitive feather work.   For the turtle I did more specific detail work as I developed the displacement maps for the  various wrinkles and scales.

Putting the textures together, I made good use of filterforge generating source images to be used in spotlight during the polypainting process.  Anyway, most of the skin was generated from this moss/grass texture:

http://www.filterforge.com/filters/5376.html

Here's an early shot of the suit with a hex pattern and showing the topology.

As I'm freely bandying about labels like "catwoman" and "ninja turtle",  these things aren't intended for commercial release.  Though the boots and hair I'm about to show might be.

Hi Joe,

I am not a fantasy render type person, but I sure appreciate what you do.  I used to browse your thread on the old Daz forum every so often, but I don't go to the Daz forums anymore (it is too hard to find anything) so I forgot about your thread.  I, for one, am glad you started one here.  I really love watching your projects.

I have your M4  Classic Trench Coat, and it is one of those go to items when I want to put a coat on a guy.  I haven't found an item yet that it will not fit over.

Wonderful work.  The Ninja Turtle reminds me of one tale which places them in a different light in feudal Japan.  I like the look of your model.

And Catwoman looks awesome!!!

If you're talking comics, I know what you're on about.  When I was a kid I would em up at the 7/11, and the only issue of ninja turtles I ever grabbed was just wildly different than what I saw saturday mornings.  pretty recently i looked it up online to find out what the deal was.  turns out it was a scattered several issue arc by michael zulli.  but yeah, it was distinctive!

http://marswillsendnomore.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/michael-zulli-ninja-turtles007.jpg

To make the grouping easier, I made each poly it's own uv group which then allowed me to use autogroup by uv's to make each poly it's own group.  I could then click in the middle of clusters of them and group them.

Cool

Many thanks for the ZBrush tips Joe!

Wonderful tips.  And yes, that is exactly the issue.  Still have it in my collection.

Oh, loving that V4 suit! Consider it bought if you do release it. Have you considered an "Alien Force"-like morph set for V4? 

Quote - Oh, loving that V4 suit! Consider it bought if you do release it.

I think at best it would be a freebie, since it's DC Comic's Catwoman outfit. There are some nice things in this thread ;).

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?170100-ZBrush-4R4-Are-YOU-read

Good grief, almost makes me a little sad that I've got to take off for a honeymoon vacation in Venice followed by a Mediterranean cruise in a few days  (well, that and the fact that an off chance of an olympic timed underwear bomb or good old fashioned random airplane crash into the ocean just terrifies me).

I saw that announcement this morning... I haven't even got to R3 because I'm backlogged on stuff so I don't want to upgrade when i'm in the middle of things.

Glad to see you starting a Sketchbook here-the Daz forums are a mess! I used to spend a lot of time there on certain topics/

joe, I love this. I can't say you give me ideas because I can't do the stuff you're doing. But I enjoy seeing you do it.

I might start one of these myself regarding materials.  

Quote - joe, I love this. I can't say you give me ideas because I can't do the stuff you're doing. But I enjoy seeing you do it.

I might start one of these myself regarding materials.  

I'd enjoy following it.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?964061&p=964061&viewfull=1#post964061

Over at the zbrushcentral, one of the modelers at gameloft posted a bunch of renders of his work on the Catwoman model for the Dark Knight Rises Mobile game.

It's phenominally cool.

That is amazing work he's doing. My only nit would be the skin is a little too translucent, but I bet that gets fixed before it goes in the game. Makes you humbled to see someone doing that kind of work. I really need to save some money and invest in some good programs. I have Blender, but I can't do anything with it. Maybe I'll get off here and put everything away until I learn to use that program...

An inspiration, Joe.

@ rokket,

I have issues with Blenders variation on cartesian coordinates and RMB to select... Lovely AND powerful piece of software though. every time I start to mess with it I lose my patience and end up back at Wings and Poser (Zbrush 2 for higher res sculpting).

That's looking fantastic!

It's great to see your work in progress here... especially relative to your use of ZBrush, which I'm just starting out learning to use myself. Thanks very much for sharing

The basic premise of the new insert multi mesh curve brushes in zbrush is that you draw a line and it inserts a mesh with a predefined start and stop mesh and a tiling middle mesh.  The zipper is one of the imm brushes that comes with zbrush 4r4 and the straps are a part of the growing multimesh repository.

Catwoman's looking awesome!

I was confused by the Daz Supersuit when I first saw it. Before I wanted to make a working zipper, this is what got me thinking about the issue. On the one hand, I knew exactly what the supersuit was.  It was an edgeloop suit, just like any of Midnight_Stories' edgeloop suits (other than the fact, I would presume, that Midnight_Stories' meshes are original, and the SuperSuit is just Genesis with some toe caps, a few extra edgeloops, and the nose, lips and ears lopped off).  But how did the supersuit do what it did? How could you inflate the various edgeloop regions?  I could imagine a tedious way of setting up those morphs, manually masking and inflating the geometry,  but that didn't seem like a smart way to make something.  I knew it had to have been made more cleverly than that, and that clever way would save me time doing my zipper morph.

In Poser and Studio, there are two kinds of groups.  You've got the grouping that goes with the rigging, your bodyparts, and you've got your material groups.  In zBrush (so far as i know), you've just got one single system of groups. You can have material groups, you can have body groups, but you can't have both. So what I would do would be model my outfit, do my grouping based on what I wanted my material groups to be, go into poser and assign those groups materials, then run the mesh through autogroup, do some tweaking, and then run it through quick conform.  I would never see the material groups in zbrush again, as, in order to make morphs, I would have to morph the mesh that had the body groups.  Loading a full body morph in any of the tools I use in conjuction with Poser 7 (Morph IMP more recently, earlier PhilC's Poser Toolbox), that didn't have the same bodygroups, will cause them to crap themselves.  Studio's no different.

From a materials group stand point, I could have things like zip pull, left zipper teeth, right zipper teeth, etc.  As, for something supersuit like, you might have a left pec pad and a right pec pad and all the loops that surround them in order to facilitate your inflating that group and allowing an inlaid boarder. From a body groups stand point, in either example, that would all just be chest.  In zbrush, then, to open the zipper (or inflate the pec pad), I'd have to mask half of the suit (and more of a hastle, half of those zipper teeth), and then pull the other half away (in the supersuit like example, mask off everything but the pec pad, hit inflate).  Then repeat for the other side (or the loops in the supersuit like example, or any other "pad"). If I could select half of those teeth at once and mask them, it'd be much easier (or just select the pad or it's loops), but if I was going to load that morph into poser (as far as my experience has taught me), I'd be forced to make the morph on a mesh where that kind of simple selection was no longer possible.

Here what I  figured out to work around that false limitation:

In both Poser and Studio, your grouping situation doesn't have to match up when you're just loading morphs into an obj.  So I can make the morph on the material group version of the mesh and load it into the body group version of the mesh obj in either program.  Then I can export out the new morphed body group version and load that in as a morph in the cr2 via morph imp in poser or the morph loader tools in studio.

I know, for many of you, the response to that is "no duh".  Still, for others, this is useful new info. This how I was able to make the zipper morph work without driving myself crazy masking off zipper teeth one by one, and this is how the morphs for an inflating edgeloop suit like the supersuit could also be done in zbrush, added  to a  cr2, and saved out for us poser 8 minus users.

Hmmm, M4 and V4 inflating edgeloop suits by Midnight_Stories with heroic/scifi/fantasy poser materials by BagginsBill and Parrotdolphin?

It could happen.

"Here what I  figured out to work around that false limitation:

In both Poser and Studio, your grouping situation doesn't have to match up when you're just loading morphs into an obj.  So I can make the morph on the material group version of the mesh and load it into the body group version of the mesh obj in either program.  Then I can export out the new morphed body group version and load that in as a morph in the cr2 via morph imp in poser or the morph loader tools in studio."

*whuh?

is this how to morph across body parts?